The Muslim mind needs to be opened. Above all, the uncritical Muslim attitude toward the Quran urgently needs to change, for it is a direct threat to world peace.Today 1.57 billion people identify themselves as Muslims. Although they certainly have 1.57 billion different minds, they share a dominant cultural trend: the Muslim mind today seems to be in the grip of jihad. A nebula of movements with al Qaeda-like approaches to Islamic precepts has enmeshed itself in small and large ways into many parts of Muslim community life, including in the West. They spread a creed of violence, mobilizing people on the basis that their identity, which rests in Islam, is under attack.

A person with a mind that has been closed unquestioningly listens to and absorbs the teachings of the fanatics who claim that it is God's law that Muslims should join the struggle. A person with an open mind—one that is empowered, that has shaken off the fear of hell—can tell the agents of al Qaeda Yes, it is true that what you say is in the Quran, but I disagree with it. Yes, you ask me to follow the example of the Prophet, but I believe that parts of his example are no longer valid. A person with an open mind is not immune, but he is armed.

I believe that it is possible for the Muslim mind to be opened and that it is crucial that the closing of so many young minds in the name of Islam should be prevented. But I think there is a much easier and more direct way of opening the Muslim mind than by reinterpreting the Quran so as to tone it down, and that is by a campaign of enlightenment.

The intellectual tradition of the European Enlightenment, which began in the seventeenth century and produced its greatest works in the eighteenth, is based on critical reasoning. It employs facts instead of faith, evidence instead of tradition. Morality in this worldview is determined by human beings, not by an outside force. It is a worldview that came into being mainly in reaction to a particular religion, Christianity, and a particular institution of Christianity, the Roman Catholic Church. The process of reaction was very arduous, and actually began centuries before the Enlightenment, when the Catholic Church did not just excommunicate people who disagreed with its worldview but persecuted them, banished them from their homes and communities, threatened them with death, and sometimes killed them.

The Muslim mind is not a monolith, but Muslims share common ideas and reactions that, in the age of jihad, are indispensable to know. For instance, I'm intrigued by the fact that hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of Muslims felt compelled to protest against a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad. Regardless of where they are born, what language they speak, whether they are male or female, rich or poor, Muslims very often refer back to the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad. The reason most often given by the agents of radical Islam to mobilize the Muslim masses is in the Quran, the Prophet Muhammad said it.

There is an enormously important scholarly movement under way to explore the nature of the historical Quran. How did the Quran come to us? When was it written, and who wrote it? What is the origin of the stories, the legends, the principles in the Quran? How do we determine its authenticity? This movement, which is largely an enterprise by secular, non-Muslim academics, seeks factual answers. Their project is not to discredit or attack Islam, or even to enlighten Muslims. These scholars have no political or religious agenda, only a classical academic approach, just like the one that has long applied historical analysis to the Old and New Testaments. Some of them fear for their lives, however, and have to write under pseudonyms. Their work is vital because, if the Muslim mind can be opened to the idea that the Quran was written by a committee of men over the two hundred years that followed Muhammad's death, the read-only lock on the Holy Book can be opened. If Muslims can allow themselves to perceive the possibility that a holy book was needed to justify the Arabs' conquests, every kind of inquiry and cultural shift is possible.

If the Muslim mind is opened, will there still be religious practice—prayer, pilgrimage, dietary laws, a fasting month? Quite possibly. There might even be anti-Semitism, veils, and domestic abuse. Tradition and habit are powerful forces. But behind the veils and beards would be minds asking questions. The possibility of legitimate, individual, critical review of Islamic dogma would at long last exist.

This can be an uncomfortable and painful possibility. Personally, I felt a sense of intense relief when I accepted the possibility that there is no life after death, no hell, no punishment, no burning, no sin. But for others, this insight can lead to misery and emptiness. My sister Haweya and my friend Tahera, whom I knew in the Netherlands, lost their fear of guilt and sin and the terror of everlasting punishment. But their sense of doom in the afterlife seemed to transfer itself into their own lives right here on Earth. I too still sometimes feel this pain of separation from my family and from the simplicity of Islam. It is like the pain of growing from childhood to adolescence or the pain of letting go of parents when they age and die. It is the pain of standing on your own two feet. It is not easy to adapt, or to make good choices; it can be a harsh, harrowing business. Enlightenment thinking will not necessarily bring happiness and ecstasy to the Muslim mind. But it will put the individual firmly in control of his or her own life. Each of us will be free to navigate our way through life, make our own wrong choices, recalculate, and choose again. We will make mistakes, but we will have a chance of overcoming them rather than just fatalistically succumbing to them as Allah's inscrutable will. Muslims will become true individuals: free, and responsible for their own beliefs and acts.

Let us imagine two teenage friends, Amina and Jane. We meet them just after the Mumbai attacks in November 2008, when Pakistani fundamentalists killed almost two hundred people.

Jane: You are a Muslim. What do you think of the men who killed people in the Taj Hotel in Mumbai? It was a hotel, people were having dinner, they were happy and innocent of wrongdoing.

Amina: Why are you asking me this question?

Jane: The killers were Muslim and they called out "Allah is great!" when they attacked. They obviously thought they were doing this for Islam. You're a Muslim too.

Amina: What has that got to do with anything?

Jane: It is your God.

Amina: People kill in the name of your God too.

Jane: Yeah, hundreds of years ago.

Amina: No, now, in Afghanistan, and in Iraq and in Chechnya.

Jane: That's not being done in the name of Christianity. Maybe Christians support those wars and maybe they don't, but they're not being fought in the name of the Bible.

Amina: Yes they are. George Bush is a Christian. It says on the dollar "In God We Trust." The American military prays before they go on a mission. All of this is done in the name of Christ, it is a Christian war against Islam.

Jane: India, they did not distinguish between military and civilians. Their victims were just tourists, they were having dinner.

Amina: Indians are killing Muslims in the name of their Hindu religion.

Jane: Would you kill for your God? Would you kill me, your friend?

Amina: What a weird question. Why do you ask?

Jane: Because you say Christianity makes people do this, Hinduism makes people do that, Muslims defend themselves in the name of Islam, whatever. Would you kill me? If a Muslim wanted to kill members of my family, would you stop him?

Amina: I don't like where this conversation is going. I want to stop talking about this.

Jane: Would you kill me? Would you stop a Muslim from killing me or my family?

Amina: Would you stop a Christian killing me in the name of Christianity?

Jane: Well, yes, actually. In a nanosecond. And you know, I'm not a Christian. I don't believe that we should take orders from an outside force. Life is my religion.

Amina: I really don't want to talk about this.

Jane: You don't want to talk about it because you would not save my life or because ...

Amina: (close to tears) I don't know. I want to do what is right. Allah tells me what is right. I just want to be a good Muslim, I don't want to kill people, I don't want people to be killed, I just want to be a good Muslim.

Jane: Are you sure you want to be a good Muslim? Here! (She takes the Quran out of her bag and puts it on Amina's lap.) Have you read the Quran? Do you know what it says? Look on this page: It says "Kill the infidels." Look, here it promises eternal punishment for all unbelievers, here, I marked it for you. And here it says "Beat the disobedient wife." Here, turn this page, look, it says "Flog the adulterer." Are you sure that you want to do what Allah wants you to do? Are you sure?

Faced with this imaginary scenario, one group of people would say that Jane is too cruel, too insensitive, that she seeks to drive poor helpless Amina over the edge. It's not Amina's fault that some Muslims act badly in the name of their shared religion. Amina needs to protect her identity and her traditions; Jane should be more tolerant, more polite. Muslim organizations would charge Jane with Islamophobia. On all sides there would arise a chorus of pity, treating Amina as a victim.

But this is exactly how minds are opened: through honest, frank dialogue. Tears may be shed, but not blood. Amina's feelings may be hurt, she may be upset or confused, but perhaps she will begin thinking, questioning her unspoken assumptions in the light of her own, real experience. It is a myth to think that people's minds will be opened by their government or some higher authority; even teachers in school are not as effective as peers. Classmates like Amina and Jane ask each other questions in the schoolyard. Colleagues confront each other on the work floor, neighbors in each other's kitchens.

My first encounter with the Enlightenment as a movement, a coherent set of ideas by philosophers who have enthusiastic supporters as well as passionate enemies, was in 1996. I was then twenty-six years old, attending the University of Leiden, one of the first great beacons of the Age of Reason. I was living among students for whom these values and ideas were so familiar that they were unaware of them: My own naive discovery of them made people react to me with a mixture of surprise, amusement, and even alarm.

The first value of the Enlightenment was one I had already encountered in the Netherlands and had taken to immediately: encouragement and reward for asking questions. The adults in my life (my mother and grandmother, other relatives, and teachers) had systematically rejected and punished inquisitive behavior as insolence toward authority. In Holland I was permitted to question authority and was entitled to an answer. This very simple attitude was to me a revelation. It reflected an attitude in which all problems had physical causes and possible solutions. Afflictions of all kinds were not simply handed down by Allah as a curse for unknowable reasons that could be lifted only by prayer. If the causes were not known, then it was a noble exercise to pursue knowledge of them; inquiry was not a blasphemous or insolent act.

I secretly used to watch a children's TV program called Willem Wever, presented by a man of that name. Children would write in questions on issues they were curious about. (This was before Google.) Their parents would assist them—assist them!—in posing the question in a clear way. Two or three questions would be selected every week, and the children would be invited onto the show to elaborate on what they wanted to learn. Then they would go on a journey to find the answer. Why do fireflies have lights in their body? Why do planets move clockwise around the sun? Why do people in England drive on the wrong side of the road? Mr. Wever and the child would visit experts and build models and put together the pieces of the puzzle; the riddle would finally be solved.

When some of my friends found out that I actually stayed at home to watch this, they treated me as if I were a child in an adult's body. But to me it was a revelation. By asking questions, you got not a scolding but answers!

This brings me to a second value of the Enlightenment that was new to me:

learning is a life-long experience and it is for everyone.

Acquiring knowledge is not reserved for adults only, or men only, or a certain clan or class only; everyone is assumed to be capable of acquiring knowledge.

The third value, individual freedom, is related to the second. If you assume that everyone, regardless of descent, sex, ethnicity, or religion, can increase his knowledge via the simple process of asking questions and seeking answers, then you have already accepted that individuals are free, because this freedom is inseparable from a life of curiosity. If the rest of the group does not like your questions, or the answers that you found, or what you did with those answers, or if you develop the annoying habit of posing more questions and chasing their answers, no matter how annoying or disrespectful they are, you run no risk of being punished.

Nobody in Leiden understood why I found this so odd, so new, so revolutionary.

SEARCHING ISLAM

A few years later, because of my research (asking questions) and my statements about Islam (the answers that I had found), I was threatened by Islamic fundamentalists. Many people, some of them the same professors and fellow students I had known in Leiden, were just as surprised then as they had been when I was a student. How could this be happening? How could it happen anywhere in the world, but especially in Holland? Surely this reactionary, violent attitude was from the Middle Ages?

It is hard for Westerners today, inheritors of the legacy of rational thought, to comprehend the phenomenon of group thinking, the claims and constraints that groups lay on their members' conscience, time, money, sexuality, loyalty, and even life.

For the fourth value of the Enlightenment (though it was not quite so clearly formulated until Max Weber put it this way in the late nineteenth century) is that the state has the monopoly on violence in society. If individuals are free to seek answers to any question, they may come up with answers that are unacceptable to some of the members of the society to which they belong. These groups may attempt to silence the questioners.They may even use violence. It is the state's responsibility to deal with outside aggression and also with cases of violence between citizens. Checks and balances bind the state to rules that counter the potential for abuse of its enormous power. If a church wants to silence a believer, the Enlightenment state stands by the individual believer, for articulate and well-educated adults may say and do what they please, so long as they bring no harm to others. Thus the thinkers of the Enlightenment devised a dynamic framework of legal and community instruments to help people resolve conflict without resorting to violence.

A fifth appeal of the Enlightenment is the idea of property rights as the foundation of both civil society and the political system. As a child, if you succeed in working your way out of a miserable parental environment, succeed in making money and buying property, the rule of law will protect you and your property.

So this, in a nutshell, was my Enlightenment:

free inquiry, universal education, individual freedom, the outlawing of private violence, and the protection of individual property rights. It did not take me long to see that the very novelty of these concepts made me treat them with much more respect than many of the people living around me in the Netherlands, who took them entirely for granted.

GROUPCOHESION

Social workers in the West will tell you that immigrants need to maintain group cohesion for their mental health, because otherwise they will be confused and their self-esteem destroyed. This is untrue.

The idea that immigrants need to maintain group cohesion promotes the perception of them as victim groups requiring special accommodation, an industry of special facilities and assistance. If people should conform to their ancestral culture, it therefore follows that they should also be helped to maintain it, with their own schools, their own government-subsidized community groups, and even their own system of legal arbitration.

This is the kind of romantic primitivism that the Australian anthropologist Roger Sandall calls "designer tribalism." Non-Western cultures are automatically assumed to live in harmony with animals and plants according to the deeper dictates of humanity and to practice an elemental spirituality.

Here is something I have learned the hard way, but which a lot of well-meaning people in the West have a hard time accepting: All human beings are equal, but all cultures and religions are not.

A culture that celebrates femininity and considers women to be the masters of their own lives is better than a culture that mutilates girls' genitals and confines them behind walls and veils or flogs or stones them for falling in love. A culture that protects women's rights by law is better than a culture in which a man can lawfully have four wives at once and women are denied alimony and half their inheritance. A culture that appoints women to its supreme court is better than a culture that declares that the testimony of a woman is worth half that of a man. It is part of Muslim culture to oppress women and part of all tribal cultures to institutionalize patronage, nepotism, and corruption. The culture of the Western Enlightenment is better.

In the real world, equal respect for all cultures doesn't translate into a rich mosaic of colorful and proud peoples interacting peacefully while maintaining a delightful diversity of food and craftwork. It translates into closed pockets of oppression, ignorance, and abuse.

Many people genuinely feel pain at the thought of the death of whole cultures. I see this all the time. They ask, "Is there nothing beautiful in these cultures? Is there nothing beautiful in Islam?" There is beautiful architecture, yes, and encouragement of charity, yes,but Islam is built on sexual inequality and on the surrender of individual responsibility and choice. This is not just ugly; it is monstrous.

No doubt there was once poetry in Somali clan culture; people dressed in colorful garments; they had a dark and biting sense of humor; they knew strategies for surviving a harsh desert environment that perhaps the world could have learned from. But the multiculturalist belief that Somali clan culture should somehow be preserved, even when its products move to Western societies, is a recipe for social failure.Multiculturalism helps immigrants postpone the pain of letting go of the anachronistic and inappropriate.It locks people into corrupt, inefficient, and unjust social systems, even if it does preserve their arts and crafts. It perpetuates poverty, misery, and abuse.

Instead of affirming the value of tribal lifestyles, people in the West—activists, thinkers, government officials—should be working to dismantle them. At least they should encourage individuals to escape them, perhaps even by providing specific incentives to those who do. Liberals should be engaged in an active campaign of civilizing—not by colonizing people, but by vigorously trying to educate them, by making freedom attractive to all, as it was conceived in the Enlightenment.

In the West, individuals free their imagination from the fear of superstition and direct their energies toward the pursuit of their own happiness. This is a great achievement. Of course there are many complacent followers of habit in the West, but individuals who want to pursue happiness on their own terms may do so. Yet Western governments also practice a racism of low expectations: they presume that people from traditional countries are like toddlers who will freeze in growth, who cannot evolve, who will never be able to let go. But I know that they can, for I have done it myself.

I strongly believe that the Muslim mind can be opened. BUT when I have criticized the teachings of the Quran, as Enlightenrnent thinkers once challenged the revealed truths of the Bible, I have been accused of blasphemy.

If you cannot voice—or even consider—criticism, then you will never see what is wrong. You cannot solve a problem unless you identify its source. And if you cannot look at the root of what is wrong with Islam today, then in a very real sense Islam has already defeated the West.

The Enlightenment honors life. It is not about honor after death or honor in the hereafter, as Islam is, but honor in individual life, now. It is about development of the individual will, not the submission of the will. Islam, by contrast, is incompatible with the principles of liberty that are at the heart of the Enlightenment's legacy.

Yet more and more people are coming to the West from countries where life is organized according to tribal custom and increasingly subjected to radical Islam. They introduce customs, practices, and dogmas that preceded the Enlightenment and are indeed clearly anti-Enlightenment.

Some people in Western society—not only multiculturalists but socialists and Christians who feel there is too much freedom in Western society—admire what they see as the innocence of these immigrants from far away, their purity, their seeming commitment to family values and cultural traditions. When the multiculturalists use the word diversity they assume that immigrants will somehow maintain their traditional culture within the Western way of life and the Western value system, like an exotic exhibit of primitive carving in a smart new museum.

Unfortunately for the West, radical Islamists reject diversity, for Islam justifies the oppression of women as well as all kinds of violence, including child marriage and marital rape.The West should eliminate such practices from its own societies and condemn them wherever else they occur across the globe. We cannot do so, however, without acknowledging that there is something wrong with the religion that justifies them.

Besides being accused of blasphemy, I have been accused of bad manners.But good manners should not be confused with free speech.

Having good manners means that when I meet a closet Islamist like the Oxford professor Tariq Ramadan, I don't pour my glass of water on his head and call him names. Exercising free speech means that I can call his book,In the Footsteps of the Prophet,a badly written piece of proselytism and say that he doesn't deserve the title of professor or a university chair from which to propagate his program of medieval brainwashing.

All this will no doubt offend Ramadan, but you cannot subject Karl Marx to scrutiny and give the Prophet Muhammad a free ride.

Free speech is the bedrock of liberty and a free society. And yes, it includes the right to blaspheme and offend.

The Muslim mind can be opened.

Hard-line Islam offers an ideal of martyrdom and a lifestyle of self-denial that is difficult to maintain. Many people, perhaps especially girls, feel trapped in the web of rules and strictures that extreme Islam demands. It is difficult to pray five times a day, to marry a man you have not chosen, and to live a life of continual self-denial. Over the long term it becomes unbearable.

Many Muslims recognize the weaknesses in Islam.

For example, a significant proportion of the mail forwarded to me is written by Muslims who agree with what I say. But they will not join me in atheism, because they still believe there must be a God. This is not easy for an atheist like me to admit, but it appears that the painstaking construction of a personal ethic is not enough for many people.

An Afghani living in California wrote me recently, "I support you and your mission. The only difference between you and me is that I covertly fight the religion of Islam and you, openly. . . . Please know that you are not alone. There is a silent crowd who agree with you and who are fighting Islam. I have my family to look after, but you're giving me the courage to speak up openly."

A Muslim woman in Canada wrote, "I have struggled with the belief system of my people for some time now, yet I am so afraid of speaking out. Speaking out comes at a price, doesn't it? I wish I was able to just disbelieve in silence and shut out the xenophobia, the homophobia and the irrationality of my people, but the hypocrisy of it all is a pain that eats away at me daily. Surely you were informed, the price one loses for disowning Islam is grave."

A woman from Sudan living in Virginia e-mailed me, "I felt what was required of me as a Muslim woman was to hate your book but then I read it and I identified with you. Every emotion that you tried to bring to words in the book, I have felt. Every mental conflict that you had within yourself I have felt. I find myself wanting to understand Islam but not being able to do so. What is it that makes Islam so enticing and perfect to my parents but so flawed to me?. ... I don't denounce Islam because I believe there is some truth to it—and if I were to renounce Islam, where would I go?" She continues, "Am I destined to hell because I did not accept what my parents destined for me?" And yet she concludes, "I don't think I have the courage to do what you have done, to question Islam as you have."

Such letters show that I am not the only Muslim woman who has dared to challenge her upbringing and faith. But there has never been a clear-cut attempt to win the hearts and minds of Muslims to the idea of critical thinking. Close textual analysis of the Quran is a start, because it will feed doubt, but it is only a start. Novels, musicals, comedies, short stories, comics, cartoons, and movies that are critical of Islamic dogma can be made. But hardly any are actually being made because of the fear of sparking violence. Take the case of Kurt Westergaard, the Danish cartoonist who drew the cartoon of Muhammad wearing a bomb in his turban. Since the cartoon was published in the fall of 2005 he has survived two attempts on his life. In the most recent one, a Somali man carrying an axe and a knife broke into his home. Scooping up his five-year-old granddaughter, Westergaard ran into a bathroom that had been transformed into a secure area and alerted the police, who came in time to catch the perpetrator. This incident, like the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the assassination of his Japanese translator, and the attempted murder of his Norwegian publisher, is bound to discourage Muslims with doubts about Islam and Westerners who want to take on the principles and icons of Islam. Terror is effective.

In recent years the persecution of people in Western societies for their ideas has become a part of our mental landscape.

Salman Rushdie has lived under a sentence of death by fatwa for twenty years.

Taslima Nasreen, who was brave enough to say that Islam doesn't permit democracy and violates human rights, now lives in hiding, without even an apartment to call her own.

Irshad Manji in Canada and Wafa Sultan in the United States, women who have dared to criticize Islam in public, now require protection, as I do,

and an intellectual like Ibn Warraq, the author of Quest for the Historical Muhammad and the impressive Why I Am Not a Muslim, must publish under pseudonyms.

It is not a trivial thing to know that, even in the West, if you criticize or even analyze a particular religion you may require protection for the rest of your life, that if you speak out about Islam you may start a riot or a massive international campaign, and that perhaps you yourself will become a target, stalked, ostracized, even murdered. It is an unpleasant option. Most people, consciously or not, seek to avoid it. Fear has an effect.

Thus slowly, and sometimes not so slowly, people begin to get used to not saying certain things, or they say them but certainly won't write them. The thin fingers of self-censorship begin to tighten around individual minds, then groups of people, then around ideas themselves and their expression. When free speech crumbles in this way, when Westerners refrain from criticizing or questioning certain practices, certain aspects of Islam, they abandon those Muslims who seek to question them too. They also abandon their own values. Once they have done that, their society is lost.